EPISODE 27: RECOMBINATORIAL STORYTELLING WITH ROGER TRAVIS

What this episode covers

Episode 27: Recombinatorial Storytelling with Roger Travis | 26 May 2026 Stephen and Trent interview their great friend and classics scholar, Dr. Roger Travis, whose forthcoming book from McFarland proposes a theory of recombinatorial storytelling in ancient epics and cooperative adventure card games. The trio discusses: Halo 2, The Aeneid, and reflections on Cultural Truth Value; Homeric bards as gamer-designers who leveraged an available technology (dactylic hexameter) to recompose myths; The repetitive “formulas” of ancient epics and their relation to modern cooperative adventure card games; Worldbuilding as a “social forces sandbox” that constrains and enables narrative possibilities; The shared structure of ancient Greek mythology and contemporary transmedia storytelling; Greek tragedy as a “snapshot” of living performance; The history of fiction writing and its parallels to curricular design; The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the Telemachy as instructional genre fiction for social education; Mirroring recomposition from the ancient world via modern transmedia stories like Star Wars; Treading the narrow line between fossilized and fluid storytelling; Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as the world’s first video game; Evolutionary tension between the desire for novel stimuli and the biochemical need for predictability; and Recomposition and worldbuilding as peas in a shared pod of iterative narrative creation. Episode References: Travis, R. (2010, November 18). A note on the word “practomime” [Blog post]. Play The Past. https://www.playthepast.org/?p=198 Bungie. (2004). Halo 2 (Version 1.0) [Xbox]. Microsoft Game Studios. Virgil. (1990). The Aeneid (R. Fitzgerald, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published ca. 19 B.C.E.) Homer. (1990). The Iliad (R. Fagles, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work published ca. 8th century B.C.E.). Homer. (1996). The odyssey (R. Fagles, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work published ca. 8th century B.C.E.). Fantasy Flight Games. (2011). The Lord of the rings: The card game. [Board game]. Fantasy Flight Games. Plato. (1992). Republic (G. M. A. Grube, Trans.; C. D. C. Reeve, Rev.). Hackett Publishing. (Original work published ca. 380 B.C.E.) Aeschylus. (1922). Seven against Thebes (H. W. Smyth, Trans.). Perseus Digital Library. https://scaife.perseus.org/library/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0085.tlg004/ (Original work published 467 B.C.E.) Plato. (1961). Letters. In E. Hamilton & H. Cairns (Eds.), The collected dialogues of Plato (L. A. Post, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work written ca. 360 B.C.E.) Rocksteady Studios. (2009). Batman: Arkham asylum (v. 1.0) [Video game]. Eidos Interactive; Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. Burton, T. (Director). (1989). Batman [Film]. Warner Bros. Timm, B., & Radomski, E. (Executive Producers). (1992–1995). Batman: The Animated Series [TV series]. Warner Bros. Animation; DC Entertainment. Traveller’s Tales. (2026). LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight (Version 1.0) [Video game]. Warner Bros. Games. Valve. (2007). Portal (Version 1.0.0) [Video game]. Valve. Squad. (2015). Kerbal Space Program (Version 1.0) [Video game]. Private Division. ZA/UM. (2019). Disco Elysium [Video game]. ZA/UM. Pope, L. (2013). Papers, Please (Version 1.4.15) [Video game]. 3909. Lem, S. (2002). Solaris (J. Kilmartin & S. Cox, Trans.). Harcourt Brace. (Original work published 1961). Tchaikovsky, A. (2015). Children of time (Children of Time series, Book 1). Orbit.

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